Before Sunday afternoon, pianist Vijay Iyer and guitarist Fareed Haque never had played a note together.

When they joined forces toward the end of a revelatory double bill at Northwestern University's Galvin Recital Hall, they underscored the uniqueness of their contributions.

The occasion was a gala celebration of Chicago's Indo-American Heritage Museum, a nonprofit institution that puts on programs across the city and flourishes online but doesn't yet have a physical space of its own.

That clearly hasn't stopped the museum from thinking big, as it did by pairing Iyer, a MacArthur Fellow and Harvard University professor, with Haque, an uncommonly versatile musician and Northern Illinois University professor. Each embraces his South Asian heritage but pushes well beyond it, intertwining jazz, classical, folkloric and other idioms.

Iyer was being inducted into the museum's Hall of Fame, and Haque was well chosen to play the opening portion of the concert. For each of these musicians takes the art of jazz in unanticipated directions, nowhere more than in their culminating duets.

The haunting, intensely chromatic melody at the core of Iyer's "Abundance" probably would be effective in any instrumental setting, but the combination of Iyer at the piano and Haque playing an instrument called a "guistar" proved indelible. In essence, the guistar is a merger of a guitar and a sitar, its slightly buzzing, droning tone bringing a distinctly Indian, mystical quality to Iyer's composition.

Each player took the lead at various junctures, the glistening quality of Iyer's keyboard touch and the intricacy of his melodic embellishments enriched by the Eastern sensibility of Haque's accompaniment.

In John Coltrane's "Naima," Haque switched to guitar, giving the duo a more traditional jazz context, though the music-making was rich in Indian rhythmic patterns. Iyer developed Coltrane's score via fleet lines in his right hand and an ultrasophisticated harmonic palette. Haque responded with mercurial gestures and nimble turns of phrase on guitar. Together they yielded considerable rhythmic surge and energy.

The solo portions of the evening also were quite substantial, each musician packing a great deal of information into every measure.

Haque opened the concert with "Paco's Blues," its flashes of flamenco rhythm and gesture leaving no doubt he conceived this as a tribute to the revered Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia, who died in 2014. The singing lines and gentle tremolos Haque brought to Wes Montgomery's "Mi Cosa" represented another homage to a master guitarist, this time with a classical tinge.

But jazz remains very close to the center of Haque's world, his elegantly reharmonized version of "You Go to My Head," ornate variations on Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" and poetic account of "Stars Fell on Alabama" affirming the point.

Iyer applies so many musical languages and strands of thought to his piano solos as to make any recital a journey across continents and eras.

His approach to Monk's "Work" captured the angular rhythms and piquant dissonances we associate with this music but much more, as well. By working polar ends of the keyboard, repeating a single bass note (which musicians call a "pedal point") and otherwise exploiting the instrument's range of textural possibilities, Iyer turned "Work" into a intense study of color, voicing and attack.

He conveyed a narrative quality in a suite of pieces saluting the Black Lives Matter movement, continuously changing the tone and character of the music, as if telling a story. And he addressed more conventional jazz tastes with Benny Golson's "Stablemates," offering a swing undertow while giving the theme a thorough workout via fast-flying right-hand lines and ample chordal dissonance.

Iyer's most romantic, rhapsodic playing emerged in his "Remembrance," originally penned as an ode to his grandparents but offered here as a memorial to the gifted Chicago filmmaker Prashant Bhargava, who died last year at age 42.

"I miss him, and I'm sure you do, too," said Iyer, speaking to a large audience that included Bhargava's parents and many admirers.